“Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power,” which has reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, was motivated by the former editor in chief of Newsweek’s first encounter with Obama while Meacham was on tour promoting his prize-winning biography of Andrew Jackson in 2008.

Jefferson loomed larger over the first half of the 19th century than most people realize today, said Meacham at the event sponsored by GVSU's Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies and the Gerald R. Ford Foundation.

Following a series of aristocratic, well-educated or well-bred presidents, Andrew Jackson and his supporters claimed to be heirs of Jefferson, never mind Jefferson was among those.

“I realized from 1800 to 1840, either Thomas Jefferson himself or a self-described Jeffersonian was president,” said Meacham, who spoke to a sold-out audience on Friday at GVSU’s Eberhard Center.

"Why are we still talking about the third president of the United States even today?
My argument is he represents the best and the worst of us,” Meacham said of the author of the Declaration of Independence and a believer in the principles of the Enlightenment who nevertheless was a lifelong slave owner and died deep in debt.

“I like writing about these figures because of their complexity,” Meacham said. “I always learn more from sinners than from saints.”

Getting a rough handle on Jefferson isn’t difficult. Jefferson kept copies of all of his written work and correspondence.

“There isn’t a point in his life where you aren’t at his desk,” Meacham said. “You may not be in his mind, but you aren’t far from his mind.”

And there’s Jefferson’s home, preserved in Virginia.

“Going to Monticello is as close as we’re going to get to Jefferson,” Meacham said. “It’s been brilliantly preserved, almost everything is original.”

The trick is getting past Jefferson’s own smokescreen, such as his choice to list his life’s accomplishments on his tombstone as author of the Declaration of Independence, author of the Virginia Statute for religious freedom, and founder of the University of Virginia.

No mention is made of his presidency.

“I think that was on purpose. Who’s going to argue about liberty, equality or education?” Meacham said. “He was legacy-shaping with that.”

Historians often have talked about the divide in the early years of the republic between Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury under President Washington, and Jefferson, first secretary of state, whose supporters took to describing themselves as Federalists and Anti-Federalists, the forerunners of today’s Republican and Democratic parties.

In “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power,” Meacham lays out his case that Jefferson, who was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States, used Hamiltonian ends to achieve Jeffersonian means.

“He wasn’t the philosophical, airy thinker his enemies wanted to see,” Meacham said. “I think they were more alike than either one of them would ever want to admit.”